Blog - ARTES MAGAZINE

‘The Rock & Roll Man’: Dancing in the Aisles at Off-Broadway’s New World Stages Theatre

OK, SO THEY WEREN’T EXACTLY DANCING in the aisles at the New World Stages Theatre the night that I attended The Rock & Roll Man. Forget that I said that. What the audience was doing to show their love for everything that was flashing before their eyes during the musical’s fast-paced two act wonder-filled 2 hours and 20 minutes was hooting, hollering, whistling, laughing, clapping, snapping their fingers, gyrating in their seats and most surprising of all shedding nostalgic tears of joy, all of this while basking in the glorious glow of Rock & Roll.

One would think that the target audience for this musical, which features the life and times of American Alan Freed (1923-1965), the American who promoted large mixed-race acts which helped spread the importance of rock and roll music throughout North America and beyond, would be the grey-headed seniors like myself.

D.C.’s Public Library, “Back to the Future”shows da Vinci’s Notebooks; Museum of American History with Buckminster Fuller’s Dome

SPECULATING ABOUT THE FUTURE is an endlessly fascinating pursuit. In his 1895 novel THE TIME MACHINE, H.G. Wells set his story at the dawn of an apocalyptic new age of modernity. Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie METROPOLIS portrayed a futuristic city where a highly-cultured utopia merrily squatted on top of a bleak underworld of workers. On a much lighter note, Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 sci-fi comedy film BACK TO THE FUTURE inserted a teenager in a time-traveling DeLorean car and sent him back 30 years to 1955 to make sure his future parents would fall in love (to thereby produce him!), and then return him to his 1985 present. In August, an Olivier-award winning musical based on BACK TO THE FUTURE will open at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre.

ICA Exhibit, Watershed, Boston: Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA’S EXHIBITION Mariposa Relámpago at Boston’s ICA Watershed is a dazzling arrangement of imaginative work. The exhibit centers on his personal journey of migration when he came to the United States as an 8-year-old fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. Several years earlier his parents escaped to the United States when in 1984, Guadalupe Maravilla was notified that a network of coyotes would guide him through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico to eventually reunite with his family in the USA. The arduous, physical journey took more than two months. Maravilla and other children were part of the first wave of undocumented youth to come to the US as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Although he emigrated when he was only eight, he didn’t become a US citizen until he was twenty-six.

Broadway’s’Bad Cinderella’: a Latina Cinderella, Her Crazy-Ass Stepmother and Two Black Princes

LITTLE DID ANDREW LLOYD WEBER KNOW when he saddled his most recent musical with the ill-chosen name Bad Cinderella that he was handing theater critics here in New York a cudgel with which to beat his latest Broadway production to a pulp. And beat it they did, savagely so, to the point of forcing it to close at the Imperial Theatre on June 4, 2023 after only 33 previews, 85 regular performances, with a loss rumored to be in the neighborhood of $19 million dollars. I might add, more or less, this same play, a retooled feminist version of the Cinderella fairytale then named solely Cinderella, opened at Gillian Lynne Theatre in London’s West End to mostly warm reviews after several pandemic-related stops and starts on June 25, 2021.

Washington’s Hillwood Museum: “Reflections in a Collector’s Eye”

“COLLECTING” IS PART OF our DNA. From earliest times, we have collected food, clothing, and shelter to survive. But once those basics are met, we look around and find something new and glitzy to make our hearts beat faster. Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) was a preeminent 20th century collector. She grew up in wealth and turned that into a megafortune as CEO of General Foods, notably embracing the new idea of “frozen foods” in the 1920s. With her fortune secured, she next decided to build a life that would make her happy.

Broadway’s ‘Parade’: Wrapped in Folds of Civic Pageantry

ALFRED UHRY’S MUSICAL PARADE, co-conceived by Hal Prince with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is now playing to sell-out crowds and rave reviews, and back on Broadway after 25 years (for a limited run through Sunday, August 6) at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York City. A long time in coming, Parade took its first Broadway bow at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998 under the direction of Harold Prince where it won a Tony Award for best score and book. It ran for 39 previews and 84 regular performances.

In a major reworking in September of 2007, Parade, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford at the Donmar Warehouse in London, opened to positive reviews. As one critic noted, “the Donmar production establishes Parade as an ambitious, musically daring piece that deserves praise attempting to intertwine the political and the personal.”

THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY in Washington, DC, has opened “1898: U.S. IMPERIAL VISIONS AND REVISIONS.” The museum describes this as the first major Smithsonian exhibition to examine the U.S. intervention in Cuba, and the nation’s expansion into Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. As such, it marks the 125th anniversary of the U.S. acquiring overseas territories and its emergence as a world power.

“PRAYER & TRANSCENDENCE” now at Washington, DC’s Textile Museum

THE TEXTILE MUSEUM at the George Washington University Museum has organized a fascinating exhibition that explores the role and iconography of classic prayer carpets–a subject I knew nothing about, but which I enjoyed thoroughly under the guidance of a superb docent.

“Pictures From Home” on Broadway: from book to stage, and into your heart

PICTURES FROM HOME currently running thru April 30 is the most delightful and thought-provoking play currently gracing the Broadway stages at this very moment. Featuring the tried-and-true Danny Burstein, Nathan Lane, and Zoë Wanamaker – three stellar actors at their very best – the play is wowing audiences with loads of laughter, wisps of tears, and nostalgia to boot, for one hour and forty-five intermissionless minutes. As to be expected, with such accomplished illuminate, be prepared to add a 7-minute tsunami of an uproariously well-deserved curtain bows.

A REDISCOVERED LINCOLN PORTRAIT AT THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, WASHINGTON, DC

THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY is currently displaying a remarkable portrait of Abraham Lincoln.The nine-foot-tall portrait by W.F.K. Travers, done from life in 1864-1865, is one of only three known full-length paintings of Lincoln. For decades, it hung in relative obscurity in the Madison, NJ, town hall. Art collector and benefactor Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge established the Hartley Dodge Foundation in the early 20th century and filled the municipal building with her collection. She added the Travers portrait to the walls of the town hall “after Congress dithered over its purchase for the Capitol” in the 1920s.